


And I Bled

by yawning_inF



Series: whumptober 2020 [4]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cults, Death Wish, Gen, Guilt, Injury, Mind Manipulation, Not Really Character Death, Poisoning, Self-Hatred, no beta (big surprise ik), this is so sloppy omg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:08:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27326335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yawning_inF/pseuds/yawning_inF
Summary: 《How can you live with the knowledge of how much blood your hands have drawn? It's enough to drown in. So you drown, sinking slowly in its murky embrace that clings to your skin with the same desperation your victims pleaded with.So you sink, and you fight, but there's nobody there to hear you screaming.You're all alone inside your mind.》Or: the one where Dick is brainwashed by crazy cultists
Series: whumptober 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951417
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	And I Bled

**Author's Note:**

> whumptober2020 days 9. Ritual Sacrifice, 15. Possession, 22. Poisoned, 23. Presumed Dead (Alt), 24. Forced Mutism and 31. Whipped

Dick has no idea how he got there. He has no idea when he first met the men, when he forgot his name, when he lost every ounce of willpower he held.

Now the wise men are all he's ever known, aside from pain and guilt and exhaustion.

The wise men ask of him to kill. The wise men must be obeyed. He doesn't want to do it. He could never forgive himself if he did. But the wise men ask of it, so his wants have little significance. He has to do it.

He has no power over himself.

They command him to kill with a different method every time. As far as he can tell they don't need him as a weapon. Those whose blood has dyed his hands are ordinary people, average, and none of the poses the wise men any threat.

That's what makes the screams even worse. That's what the men in the cloaks say relieves him of mankind's sins.

Each day, or night, he can't know for sure, they bring a new person in front of him and before he knows it he's taken yet another life.

By the time it dawns on him what he's done, the only one of the wise men encased in white linen fabric has taken a white piece of cloth and dips it inside the pool of tacky crimson slowly spreading throughout the room, dying his collapsed knees in red

And as he lies there fallen on his knees, still caught in the awful space between his almost unknowingly committed atrocities and the realization of terror and guilt, two men approach his still in sock body and grab his arms and wrists, restraining them behind his back so harshly his muscles protest.

He fights. He fights at first, but the men always keep him in place one way or another, whether it involves the aching paralysis the passage of electricity through his flesh brings or not.

They keep him in place, right atop the holy symbol drawn in a circle across the marble floor, for the high priest.

The "priest" arrives then, murmuring his "prayers" for the holy child they are forging. And whatever quip or witty comment might have been ready to fall off Dick's lips dies down on his tongue as the sour taste of cloth and blood covers it.

He struggles against the men's grasps, averts his head as much as he can without his bruised neck hurting him, squirms around left and right: trying to spit out the cloth and his bitter saliva all over the priest's pearly robes.

And he succeeds, perhaps once but soon enough the man with the whip returns, courtesy of Dick's own futile defiance.

They strip his back bare despite his best efforts to escape their hold, despite his pleas to spare him just this once, for the deep slashes on his flesh still lie open wounds from their previous encounter.

The men don't listen of course. They never do.

As the leathern whip clashes against his bare skin the iron hooks attached to its end don't retract themselves like the rest of the instrument would in their absence.

Or more precisely they do, only never without extracting bits and parts of flesh, tearing through the freshly scarred tissue inch by inch, as they travel and maime his skin all over.

Dick screams in utter agony as the whip comes down with brutal force and ferocity, ripping off chunks of flesh behind which blood begins to pour down his back with the leather's every return.

Dick screams, loudly and hoarsely until his voice is terribly distorted, now sounding more like strangled, muffled cries through the bloody dampness of the cloth they stuffed into his mouth sometime amidst the mind numbing pain shaking apart his cells.

When they leave him in his cell the filthy piece of fabric they drape across his back has stuck to the fresh blood still oozing from his countless open wounds, and he already shudders at the thought of its removal.

***

Time is no longer measurable. He's killed, he's bled, and he's bled another's blood and they've bled his. He'll be ascending soon, that's the only thing they tell him. He'll be gone soon.

Hopefully the pain will be gone too.

The taste of blood on his tongue isn't foreign, but not welcome either. The cloth tastes like iron, it feels like iron bars of a cell holding him imprisoned.

At nights he's screaming as he chokes on his own blood, blood sticking on his throat.  
Then he remembers it's not his own blood he's choking on and he remembers that his screams cannot be heard loudly enough through the cloth stuffed in his mouth, drying out his saliva.

"Worry not, Lamb, for you will be sacrificed to the gods, and your spirit will ascend to greatness"

 _Then what are you waiting for? Why don't you end my misery?_ he wants to ask, but the taste of dried blood against his tongue is a reminder of the barrier that keeps the words from falling off his lips.

One day they bring him a child instead of a man. They tell him it's his brother and so Dick believes them. He can barely see the child in the half light, but he can hear the breathy pleas and wails shaking his small body.

There must have been a time when he could have recognized that the child was not in fact his brother, but it's been so long since then, and the only thing he has ever truly heard since are the voices of the wise men and the ghosts of his own screams.

The wise men hurt him every day and force him to hurt others, but they're the only constant in the life he can remember, So Dick trusts them.

He doesn't want to hurt the small child. He's his brother and he can distinctly remember loving the bearer of the title.

No matter how hard he tries he can't bring his name to the front of his mind. Fairly enough he only barely knows what his own name used to be. The wise men have no need for such concepts, and he supposes it doesn't matter enough.

Whatever his name used to be, it isn't falling from anyone's lips, least of all his own.

The only thing that matters is for the pain and blood to stop.

"Kill him, Lamb," they order, "and through his blood shall you be purified and readied for the gods"

Dick doesn't want to hurt his brother, even though he does not remember his voice nor name. His soul is holding him back each time they ask of him to become pure.

He thinks.. perhaps he has been far purer before, but certainly not in this way they ask of him.

The child's blood is the next to share its taste with him, plaguing him day and night, making him wish he knew when he did it, knew when he forced yet another soul to abandon its flesh so he could stop, but he's never conscious when it happens. Not in any way that he could register.

His mind is almost constantly blank, and when it isn't it's only ever able of conjuring nightmares not too different from his life.

The cloth chases any warm thought away before it has had the time to lend him hope.

His days are short and bleak. His time is even shorter. But perhaps that's for the better.

Deaths pass him by in a blur. They can't worsen his guilt any further. The priest says it's time. He's pure. He will ascend. He will grace the gods, and so the gods will grace him.

Hail the gods. Curse the gods.

There are no gods he can remember believing in.

The wise men give him a scrap of paper the night before, and a chewed down pencil. They say he needs to let it all out. Nothing that Dick needs to let out can be described by words.

Only by blood.

And since they told him to express this sensation in detail, he assumes that as enough of a granted permission to touch the cloth with his own hand.

His mind alerts him not to. It's been conditioned to steer clear of it for time akin to years. He couldn't possibly know.

Just a finger. A single one.

It hurts his soul, but he makes it. And after the stain is spreading its inky tendrils on the yellowing edges of the paper, his hand finds the way to letters.

***

The silhouette barges inside the warehouse. It takes the shadow less than seconds to get all of the wise men down to the earth. The gods they worshipped were gone: they didn't protect them.

They abandoned them, despite the cautiously cultivated sacrifice.

The shadow hovers over the scattered bodies, but wait-

That's a different shadow. The silhouette that knocked out all the men can't see the shadow's blue undertones gazing at it.

The silhouette stops in front of the body of a young man sprawled right amidst the wide circle drawn on the ground.

The shadow -Dick- watches curiously as the ebony silhouette kneels down on the ground in front of it. There are three items positioned next to the lifeless body Dick can faintly recognize as his: the bloody white of the cloth, testament to his guilt. An empty graven cup with remnants of a liquid inside -he supposes it's the poison he drank to leave, testament to his innocence.

And... the scrap of paper

The silhouette takes the scrap into his mildly trembling hands, touching it with atmost caution, as though it would dissolve with one wrong brush of the silhouette's gloves against it.

The silhouette of a man, but with elements bat-like incorporated into the lean black shadow. _Strange_ , is all Dick's shadow notes as the bat-man quietly reads his son's last words to himself.

《Are you the one to blame when it was other's who pulled your strings all along? Can you even close your eyes without being haunted by the ghosts of the lives you took while the shadows were tainting your soul? You've been fooled, you've been tricked. Forced into a scheme you never swore to play.

Nobody blames you, for that, it wasn't your fault. But how can you live with the knowledge of how much blood your hands have drawn? It's enough to drown in. So you drown, sinking slowly in its murky embrace that clings to your skin with the same desperation your victims pleaded with.

So you sink, and you fight, but there's nobody there to hear you screaming.

You're all alone inside your mind.》

Dick has no recollection of writing this.. thing, but somehow he knows how to recite the next of the words when the silhouette stops somewhere in the middle and drops the scrap to the ground. It sinks into the pool of blood around his body's back. It will never be read again.

The silhouette's arm shoots up to his head, and when he frantically takes off the dark cowl concealing half his face, Dick sees the terror on his familiar eyes.

 _Dad_ , he breathes out after so much time, he remembers, after all this time, but Bruce is panting and he can't listen.

"Dad!" he shouts then, as the tears begin welling in his eyes.

Bruce gently scoops up the body in his arms, but Dick can't feel his warmth. He can only feel his father's cries resonating deep inside his shadow, and dimming the light inside.

He's eight, all of a sudden. Just a small boy. The men's gods stop calling to him, to their gift. Even they pity him. But the boy is inconsolable and so is the father.

And on that night that Batman cries and mourns with all that was left from his soul after the second son's death, another shadow slides up next to the small boy.

 _Wake up_ , it says. _It's not your time to go_.

How can he wake up? How can he reclaim a body that's no longer his?

 _Wake up_ , the shadow insists. _Wake up and tell Bruce that we love him. That we love him and we're sorry._

Dick nods. Somehow the shadow makes sense. He closes his eyes, and waits.

He can faintly feel Bruce's desperate efforts to bring him back. So he closes his eyes and waits.

He waits to remember. And he waits to forget.

And he waits to tell their father that they love him, and they're sorry, Jason and he.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!!!! I'd very much appreciate if you'd tell me what you think! Love yall <3


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